The ultimate plan for engineering a smooth intimate relationship.

Video Transcript

Hey, this is Leo from Actualized.org, and in this video we’re going to talk relationship advice.

Let’s talk a little bit about relationships. What I want to do in this video is give you some deep insight, some deep advice about relationships. How do you create a situation in your life, where you have a deep, fulfilling, successful relationship? What I’m going to do in this video is give you some deep wisdom, some stuff you might not want to hear.

This is how it actually has to happen. I’m going to go into some of the problems, and some of the reasons why people go about this completely the wrong way. If you’ve been struggling to create a good, happy relationship, it’s going to become immediately obvious to you why this is. We’re going to touch on the deep root causes.

When I started to really study sexuality, and dating and relationships, the way I started to do that was by getting involved with the pick-up community. People hear this and say “Oh, pick-up community. That’s weird. What are you doing? You’re a player. This is stupid. How can you be doing this stuff?”

I’m going to cover that in other videos. I’m not going to get into that. It’s a very deep topic. What I want to say is that the reason I actually got into pick-up was because of this problem I saw. There is a problem in society — this is a problem that applies to you no matter who you are, what gender, what race, what country you’re in, what age, anything.

A Staggering Failure Rate

If you want a successful intimate relationship, then you’re going to have to deal with the harsh reality that we have a forty percent divorce rate. At a minimum, forty percent divorce rate. Not only that, but the people that still stay married, the sixty percent that do stay married, large majority of them are married but miserable.

The people that get divorced or are not even in a marriage, but are simply in a long term relationship, or any kind of relationship, a lot of those are dysfunctional as well. When you see that, when I see that, I tell myself “OK, so clearly something is amiss here. Something is awry.”

The way people are dealing with relationships, the way they’re managing their relationships, the way they’re approaching hem is fundamentally flawed. Can we agree on that, that it’s fundamentally flawed, if the overwhelming majority of everyone in the world is struggling with this issue, and is in a dysfunctional relationship, or is in a relationship that has to end in some of bitter divorce?

Can we assume that? This is why I got into pick-up. Ultimately, I didn’t get into pick-up for sex. That’s why most people get into pick-up. A guy, he’s young, he wants to have some sex, he wants to bang a bunch of hot girls, so he get’s into pick-up.

That’s not really why I got into pick-up. I got into pick-up for personal development reasons. I got into pick-up because I saw that what I wanted as a goal for myself — as a goal for myself, I said “What I really want is a really amazing girlfriend. I want someone I can be really compatible with. I want to be able to manage that in an excellent way. I want to have a relationship that’s extraordinary, and that’s not the kind of relationship I see other people having.”

I didn’t see my parents having it. I didn’t see any of my friends’ parents having it. I didn’t see it happening in the movies. I didn’t see it happening in popular culture. I didn’t see celebrities having it. Anywhere you look, you see examples of massive failure, ways not to do it.

What I said to myself was “OK, wait a minute. If I really want to have a successful relationship, then I have to start addressing some of these problems. Clearly, if I just do what other people do, I’m going to get the kind of results they’ve gotten. I’m not satisfied at all with that kind of life.”

For me, I said “OK, I’ve got to do something different.” So I turned to pick-up. I started exploring a lot of stuff. Eventually I found pick-up, got into that, learned so much, but ultimately where that was coming from was to understand.

I knew that, to really master this relationship situation, to create an amazing relationship, to have a nice girlfriend, to maybe get married at one point and actually keep it happy and long lasting, the only way I could do that was if I applied massive intellect to the process, massive amount of consciousness, and practice and experience.

Take It Seriously

That’s the only way it can happen. That’s my relationship advice to you. If you want a really excellent relationship, you have to start to take it very seriously. I find most people take relationships very casually, in the sense that they don’t study. They don’t try to learn about how to actually create a successful relationship.

They just assume they’re a master at it already. They just assume they know how to love. They know what love is. They know what sex is, they know how to have sex. They know how to communicate. They know how to manage emotions. They know everything. They’re suddenly an expert, when in fact, they know nothing.

This ignorance keeps them totally in the dark. It keeps that cycle of dysfunctional and broken relationships happening again and again. It’s an interesting statistic that of the people that do get divorced, those same people, if they remarry, their chances of divorce actually increase.

That’s called second divorces. Second divorces are more likely to happen if you’ve already been divorced. What happens is that if you get divorced twice, the chance that you get married again and get divorced is even higher.

Basically, people are getting divorced and becoming stupider and stupider in the process. It’s not that they’re getting more successful, they’re getting even less successful. It’s a crazy world, crazy statistic.

With that being the case, you have to really teach yourself. Don’t assume that you know what a good relationship is. Don’t assume you know anything about relationships. Honestly, you don’t. You’re not born knowing how to create good relationships. That’s not how it is.

Just because you’ve been with a high school sweetheart or you dated a few people, does not make you a relationship expert. Chances are that unless you’ve heavily studied relationships and sexuality, then you know very little about the psychology of the opposite sex. You know very little about female psychology and you know very little about male psychology.

Study Relationships

Guys know very little about girls, and girls know very little about guys. Because we don’t understand each other, it’s very difficult to have a successful relationship. The solution here is to study it. If you want to become an excellent golfer, what would you do? If you wanted to become a professional golfer, someone that can rival Tiger Woods, what would you do?

Would you just pick up a club and swing it away and expect to become Tiger Woods? Or would you start cracking books and going and finding coaches and tutors to help you understand how the game works, and practicing your ass off, and dedicating yourself to it. You would do that. You would commit to a path of mastery.

If you wanted to become an engineer, how would you do that? Would you become an engineer by simply sitting at home and building little things in your little workshop? Or would you start cracking open books and spend years learning physics and chemistry, and mathematics and advanced calculus, and then going and getting a degree in engineering.

Maybe getting a master’s degree in engineering. Going and doing an internship at an engineering company, and learning the whole process of how engineering works, and then actually getting a job as a certified engineer. Which one of those is a better path towards mastering engineering?

It’s the second. It’s the mastery process, the path of mastery. You’re not going to get good by just assuming you’re already a good engineer, or a good golfer. Likewise with the relationship. If you want to be good in a relationship, you have to study. You have to study sexuality. You have to study the opposite sex’ psychology. You have to study your own psychology.

You have to study the problems that are common in relationships, all the common pitfalls. You have to work deeply on yourself, to start to fix all the potential hang-ups that could sabotage your relationship. This is ultimately my advice to you: start to look at your relationship as something that’s very serious, something that you’re going to master, something that you’re going to really study, apply a lot of conscious effort to.

Fix Yourself

Ultimately, the way you’re going to fix your relationship is by fixing yourself. You cannot control the other person. This is one of the things you’re going to start to learn when you study the psychology of other people. You’re going to learn that controlling other people is a huge waste of time, and it’s not going to work.

The only thing you can control is yourself. The only thing you can change is your own psychology. If you keep getting into dysfunctional relationships, and they keep failing, it’s not because other people are bad. It’s because your psychology is sabotaging you.

You have to commit to personal development. That’s what I did. That’s why I got into pick-up. If you start to do pick-up correctly — there are a lot of methods of doing pick-up that are incorrect, and I don’t advocate — but if you start doing it correctly, what you’re going to do is a lot of deep inner personal development work.

You have to. What you realize if you go out and try a couple of pick-up lines, little gimmicks, is that women don’t respond to that. You’re not going to get laid from that. The only way you’re going to get laid, and then get a relationship and potentially a marriage, is if you start to work on yourself.

If you’re coming from a place where you’re very deficient, like I was, with women and dating, you don’t understand anything, and you can’t get a date to save your life, then you have to admit to yourself: “Well, damn it. I don’t really know enough. I’m not confident. I’m not doing things correctly. I’m screwing something up in the process.”

When you realize that, you say “Oh, OK. There’s something wrong with me. I have to go and start to fix, start to improve my understanding”. That’s what I did. I went through a long, grueling two-year process, and I’m still going through it, of increasing my understanding and direct experience with the opposite sex.

All of that ultimately came back to me. It was about improving me. To get into a better relationship, to get a better quality girl, to get a better quality man, the way you do that is by working on yourself. Personal development — that’s all you need. You don’t need anything else. You need knowledge and understanding of relationships, and then you need to work on yourself.

Come From Abundance

Here’s what you should work on: you should work on the following things. Number one is your sexual abundance. You have to be abundant. You cannot be in scarcity mode and be in a successful relationship.

That means that if you’re super needy and you have no options with the opposite sex at all, and you just happen to get lucky one day. One day some guy or girl comes up to you and you strike up a conversation, and you two fall madly in love.

That might seem like you got saved. Actually, you didn’t get saved at all. Because your neediness, the lack of abundance that you have, is going to manifest and is going to creep into that relationship. It’s going to totally destroy it. No chance in hell, at all.

That stuff you see in movies? Those romantic comedies where just two people bump into each other, and maybe you have some desperate girl or some desperate guy, and they bump into each other and their life is just this beautiful romance? Never going to happen in real life.

In real life what happens is that when you’ve got a desperate guy or a desperate girl and they come together, what happens is that desperation seeps in there and toxifies their relationship. It basically completely destroys it. That’s why you need to have abundance. You need to have options. You cannot be in scarcity.

You can’t be in a successful relationship, all the while fearing that if that person leaves you, then you’re fucked. Or not fucked, as the case may be. You cannot maintain a successful relationship like that. It’s too much pressure. That pressure will kill you. It will destroy the relationship. You have to create abundance.

Work on yourself to create that abundance. You can do that by going out and socializing more, building a bigger social circle, doing pick-up, going to bars and clubs, whatever. There’s a million different ways. I’m not going to get into all that here.

Get Your Money In Order

The next thing is finances. Get your finances in order. Get your career in order. Get your business in order. I think the number two reason — I was looking at the statistics — the number two reason that people get divorced is because of financial difficulties, financial problems. Finance creates a lot of tension in a relationship.

If you’re strapped for money, or the other person’s strapped for money, or you cannot handle your money, or you waste it too frivolously, or you’re too stingy with it, and the other person is too — dealbreaker. The relationship is going to end. It’s going to be very miserable.

You want to make sure you have a good understanding of money, good grasp of your financial situation. You can handle your money well, so that you’re not dysfunctional in that area of your life. Many ways to do that, that I won’t cover here.

Be Healthy

Next is your health. You need to take care of your health. That means nutrition and fitness, nutrition and gym. Whether you’re a guy or a girl, this applies to you. If you have bad health, it’s going to start to sabotage your relationship as well, in all sorts of ways.

If you’re a woman, it’s going to become problematic because guys are very visually oriented, and if you start to let your health slide, then the guy might just simply leave you. If you’re a guy, and you start to let your health deteriorate, there’s all sorts of different problems that come up with that.

You start to get low energy. All of a sudden you can’t do exciting stuff anymore with your girl. What happens then is that you basically start to distance from each other, and she loses attraction for you. Or some sort of other tensions are created because of health, lack of fitness and lack of proper nutrition. That’s one you have to look out for.

Work On Your Psychology

The other stuff is the psychology. You have to start to work on your psychology. You have to really take a look at any kind of limiting beliefs, or any kind of serious psychological hang-ups that you have. Those are going to get amplified in a relationship tenfold.

It’s going to totally blow up the relationship if, for example, you have anxiety, if you have anger problems, if you have childhood issues, if you have severe irrational paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, any kind of neurotic behaviour.

When you’re with somebody, and you’re with them for a long time, that neurotic behaviour starts to manifest itself in so many nasty ways that it toxifies that relationship, makes it impossible to have one.

Those are some of the areas in your life, and there are probably more, I’m not going to cover all of them here. These are some of the pillars you have to cover, to maintain a healthy relationship. This is ultimately my advice to you: do personal development. Take relationships very seriously. Put the burden of responsibility on yourself.

It’s not luck that’s going to create a good relationship. There are no lucky good relationships. It’s not going to happen by luck. It’s not just going to magically happen and you’re not an expert unless you study this stuff, and you really analyze all this stuff, and do a lot of introspection.

Even if you have done all that, and you yourself have no personal self-control — if you’re anxious, if you’re prone to anger, childhood issues, you’re bad with your finances, you have no other options, you’re neurotic in all sorts of different ways — it’s impossible.

The best person in the world, Jesus Christ himself, if he was resurrected and was in a relationship with you, he could not make it work. You have to realize that. It’s so important. This is the core fundamental of relationship advice. It’s not a little trick, it’s not some little technique. It’s not something you read in Cosmo magazine. This is it. This is the deep wisdom.

This means you have to do a lot of work. The amount of work I’ve put into understanding the opposite sex is obscene. It would literally disgust you to know everything I’ve done to do it. I’ve literally bleed for it. I’ve literally invested hundreds of hours studying. I’ve invested thousands of hours in the field, practicing this stuff, doing it. And I’m still not at the level I feel I need to be, to maintain a successful relationship.

It takes a lot. If relationships are important to you, if you really value that in your life, if you think you need love and companionship, and you want that to work out, then this is what you’ve got to do. Then it’s worth it, right? You’re not going to get something of true value for nothing.

The things that are really worthwhile in life you have to put a little bit of effort into. You have to put a little bit of consciousness into. You have to commit to some sort of mastery process. That’s what I’m encouraging you to do with your relationships.

Wrap Up

This is Leo signing off. This is what I have to say about relationships. Go ahead and post me your comments down below. I love what you guys think about this. This is issue is especially fascinating to me. Go ahead and like this and share it. Click the like button right now if you did.

Of course, come check out Actualized.org. Sign up to my newsletter. I release new videos, new articles, other goodies every single week, all for free. I’m releasing that stuff because I want to help you get on track with your dreams.

What I found is that, to create an extraordinary life, whether it’s with relationships or money, or fitness, or health, or your career, or anything, to do that you need to really get on board and become a hobbyist of personal development. Start to master your own psychology.

The best way to do that is to keep yourself on track in a steady way. Don’t just watch one video. One video’s not going to fix you. It’s not going to change your life. But through a gradual process of watching a video every other week, or watching a few videos here and there, going out and taking some action, doing some exercises — that kind of process can create an extraordinary level of quality in life, multiplied over months and years.

That’s really what I want you to buy into. Go ahead and sign up with Actualized.org, because we make it very easy to stay on track with your dreams.

Hello! I here have some thoughts about the point ”If you want a really excellent relationship, you have to start to take it very seriously.”
Well, it is a nice objective to take smth very seriously and work on it. It may bring good results. But what I can see is also this: the more serious you are, the more desperate it looks like, it feels like. I’d say it is important how a person handles disappointment and lack of smth in the relationship. Or in other words IF one can handle it. You may be serious about the relationship but you may get reactions like “Why talk about this? You brought the problems up again, you spoiled my evening, my Sunday by too much analyzing.” I mean even if you try, you never know what kind of reaction it all is going to create. Someone may not like his partner analyzing, see it as negative.
To work on oneself is another question, it will always pay off, and certainly take much time.

Don’t get me wrong, you ought to be serious ABOUT the relationship, but not serious IN the relationship. See the difference? Inside the relationship you can have fun and act goofy and playful and all that. If you want this relationship to work, you have to be very diligent about pruning problems as they come up and thinking ahead. You should not be discussing most of this stuff with your partner. Only rarely.

Hi Leo, Glad I’ve found your website at this juncture in my life as the toxification of my relationship you speak of has been slowly creeping in for over a year now…harking back to childhood trauma. My partner and I have shared our lives for almost seven years now, we have a fantastic communicative relationship and we are discussing these current problems; I’m also mindful, however, that I need to work on me and not be overbearing with my issues. This is where I think your website comes in.
I am taking this very seriously and the sole reason I have stumbled upon your material is from studying mastery of the self. I’ve found several helpful sites in my pursuit but yours seem to hit home hardest. I have a 10 day vipassana coming up and will be using the opportunity to ‘go in deep’ and get some serious work done on myself, I look forward to studying more of your videos. Thank you for your wisdom

Great! But your Vipassana is designed for another purpose entirely. Don’t use it to think through every-day problem. You must go mind-less and forget all this stuff. Meditation is for discovering the truth of no-self, not for personal development.

Thank you for your generosity and sharing these very insightful videos. I’m turning 24 next month. I’m in the process of applying to grad school and finishing prerequisites. I’m working part time and I practice martial arts when I can. Therefore, I don’t have a lot of time for much else but I don’t want my social life to be cast out of my life. But I’ve been so focused on myself and my goals that I’ve been having difficulties being fun and exciting in my dating life. I feel like I need to balance my life better in terms of going out and socializing more but I have financial restraints(relatively broke) and my mind is focused on my career and martial arts. I’m not the most outgoing person but I do try to keep conversations going and I’m slowly but surely working on my communication skills. I know in one of your videos you advice guys to have sex with a lot of different women to grow yourself as a man. At one point I was doing alright with women but I guess I lost my balance and my dating life /social life went downhill. It’s just been hard finding a balance lately especially with the fact that I’m not yet financially independent. Not sure if you could give me advice but would love to hear back from you.

Hello Leo,
Have been fascinated by your web site since finding it this morning. The one thing I find slightly uncomfortable with is the advice your offer that both men and women should have sexual abundance and have people of the opposite sex as options should the relationship they are in not work out. I have been in such a relationship and knew that other options where available to my partner which made me feel he wasn’t being loyal to me as this thought was always in the background. Perhaps this is my own insecurities but it certainly had a bearing in us breaking up. My ex partner certainly did not like it when I had male friends and it’s seemed like he had double standards! Advice please would be appreciated. X

Hey leo. Could you make a video on how to socialise effectively. As i really wanna be able to develope good social skills and join social circles in my school because i’m having a few issues in my socialising at school i don’t know how to get the right mindsets about it, i don’t know how to act so i’m authentic and socialise without so much consciousness of how im tryin to act around people and just how to build up more and more interactions. I don’t know how to go about creating a good social life in my school and it’s been pressuring to me throughout high school cause i just wanna get this handled and i don’t actually really know how to deal with it or even how i should think of it. Or at least give me about of advice and an insight towards how i should work on this area and how i should actually think about this. i’m kinda stuck in the adolescent type of mindframe i guess

Hi Leo!
My name is Rebeca. I found your website looking trough the web trying to find ways to fight my anxiety and depression. Most of my fears are related to the relashionship I’m currently in. We’ve been together for almost five years, and started being long distance (really long) from august last year. He’s in San Francisco, USA, I’m in Milan, Italy, and our finances are very complicated so we have seen each other only once. We are suposed to reunite again on August but I’m going crazy in the meanwhile, thinking all the time that we are just not going to make it and I think my needingness is breaking us appart. I have fear the end of this relashionship for so long and I know is not ok to feel this way and that its my own responsability to change it. But I just cannot stop thinking about him… I don’t feel him very exited about meeting me in august… I don’t know if its normal that we only talk once a week or so…. I don’t know how to feel sure about us… How to know for sure that everything is ok and he’s not just saying so because he might be afraid of hurting me…. I just know I need help

hey Leo!
I am from India. I was in a serious relationship for 4 years even our families knew about the relationship. and then I left for my masters to the the USA. There I met a guy and he was so persistent about getting me that I ended up cheating the guy I love so much. Then I told my bf everything that has happened. He was so devastated and betrayed. He told his sisters about what has happened. I discontinued my masters and headed back home so that I can work things with him. We both sorted things out and understood why this happened in the first place. I took full responsibility for everything that has happened. I want to live for him now. I want to keep him happy, but his sisters are not ok with we being together. Should I directly confront them and confess everything and ask them to forgive me? they dont know that I know they know about all this.How can I make it work? I dont want to run away from this. Everytime they speak about me to him.. he s going very weak. I really want to make things work. Please help me Leo.

Hi Leo
thanks for sharing . this is an area that I m struggling. I have been separeted for 8 years and divirced for three. i just decided to move on and seek a permanent realtionhsip. i enjoed male companies but i find anytime that i may see that they show interest in me i draw back. I do agree with your points on self development. I dont socialiazde much my LIFE is asically work and chruch there are not many activites that i have time to take part in. i just reconnectd with a guy that i went to schoo, with 32 year go . we have a distance relationhsip and it has been fun . He was supose to visit but he could not make it and I felt disappointed. Ever since the cancellation of is visit ont feel conected to him like before.. Do yo think I took the relationshp too seriously?

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